MBW - 3/15/2022
Good morning friends. Your daily digest is ready. Let’s get to it:
•Kyiv has been bombed repeatedly during the past 24 hours with residential buildings and metro stations hit hard.
•A Russian state tv news program was interrupted by a ‘No War’ protest. During the ‘Vremya’ news program on Russia’s main TV channel, Maria Ovsyannikova, a Channel One employee rushed into the camera with a poster saying ‘Stop the war, don’t believe the propaganda’.
•We have mentioned in this blog how the weaponization of the central bank reserves would undermine the role of the dollar as a global reserve currency. Well, seems like it didn’t take long to prove that. India and sanctions-hit Russia are exploring the possibility of using China’s yuan as a reference currency to value the rupee-ruble trade mechanism, two Indian government officials aware of the development said.
•Also this:
•In other news, there seems to be a serial killer on the loose in New York City who has been targeting sleeping homeless people. This New York Post article contains video of the latest assault which resulted in the death of the victim.
After keeping Covid at bay for two years, Omicron has hit Hong Kong and New Zealand, but the outcomes could not be more different.
After accounting for lag between infection and death, 1 in 20 cases in Hong Kong currently ends in death. To put that into context, Hong Kong’s fatality rate is currently higher than England’s pre-vaccine peak. Hong Kong has now set a new global record for daily deaths.
Hong Kong’s total death toll has risen almost vertically in the past two weeks and it keeps growing.
So what is driving this? Vaccines, more specifically the elderly vaccination rate.
When Omicron hit, more than 2/3 of people aged 80+ in Hong Kong were still unvaccinated compared to a couple of percent in New Zealand and Singapore.
Aside from Hong Kong itself, the looming crisis is mainland China, where elderly vaccination rates are only slightly better than HK. Around 15 million over-80s in mainland China are still unvaccinated. An astonishing number.
Source: ft.com (as usual, to bypass the paywall, google the title and access it from there).
This is the story of a man who got out after spending 44 years in prison. The way he experiences this modern world of ours is fascinating.
On 5 May 1970, 25-year old Otis Johnson was arrested in New York for the attempted murder of a police officer. A conviction that would see him spend the next 40 years of his life in prison. A conviction he has strongly rebutted every day since being detained. Despite the lack of evidence and credible eyewitnesses, Otis was sentenced to 25-to-life and was denied parole seven times for refusing to confess. “I meditated a lot,” Otis reflects, explaining how training to be a monk in Hong Kong when he was younger helped him get through four decades of incarceration. “Going to prison as a person who had practiced as monk and was also a Muslim. I had the discipline already. I didn’t have fear.”
Once he got out iPhones, Times Square, jars of pre-mixed peanut butter and jelly... everything was new or starkly different.
And here’s his quest to find his family:
Being bad at sports I always found solace in the thought that at least I was smarter than, say, all the Messis and Ronaldos out there. Turns out I was wrong.
Top-tier players think more clearly, quickly and flexibly than non-players, and there is a correlation between cognitive ability and the number of goals and assists a soccer player scores, a group of Swedish researchers has found. Their study, published in the journal PLoS One, says measuring cognitive skill could predict a player's potential.
From the article: The findings suggest future soccer stars could be identified early in their careers and teams could consider cognitive performance alongside athletic skill when choosing players.
And lastly, the usual pics, vids and memes from around the web:
Oh Lord giveth me the strength to followth this trailblazer.
Russia for the win.
You got me.
Well, that explains everything.
The richer you are, the easier it is to get a bone spur I guess.
Well, not everyone can afford to drink gasoline these days. Lucky bastard.
This is what happens when Photoshop is banned in your country.
That is all for today as well. Off you go. See you tomorrow.